Tag Archives: Google

Amanda alerted me to this 2013 video we have available to us from Kanopy: Google and the World Brain. Here’s the synopsis of it from Kanopy:

In 1937, the science fiction writer H. G. Wells imagined a “World Brain” containing all of the world’s knowledge, accessible to all people, that would be “so compact in its material form and so gigantic in its scope and possible influence” that it could transcend even nation states and governments. Seventy years later, Google set about realizing Wells’ vision, launching a massive project to scan millions of books from university library collections — and triggering a fierce backlash in the process. When it was discovered that over half of the first ten million books Google scanned were still in copyright, authors from around the world joined together to wage a fierce legal battle against the Internet giant, culminating in a dramatic courtroom showdown in 2011.

In gripping detail, Google & the World Brain tells the fascinating story of this complicated struggle over intellectual property and access to human knowledge, offering crucial insights into broader debates surrounding data-mining and privacy, downloading and copyright, fair use, freedom and surveillance.

Over on the blog I set up for students in my section of LIB 3040, I wrote a post about a recent study that suggests that racial stereotypes are encoded into the algorithm used to determine what ads to display alongside your search results in Google.

Search Algorithms
We watched a video from Google about how they update the search algorithm every day based on data.[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/J5RZOU6vK4Q" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

We also discussed the way that Google’s business is so driven by data from all its services, a topic raised in Steven Levy’s recently published book, In the Plex. We considered how your location and who your online friends are can shape your search results, something that Eli Pariser gets at in the video from TED that we watched.[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/B8ofWFx525s" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

New Library Website
We got a peek at an early working draft of the home page supplied by the developer based on the student input that was previously posted in the Idea Lab. Several more drafts are expected before the home page is put through rounds of usability testing with students. We talked about how a search box for a discovery layer from Summon might work on the home page.

Intro
In advance of the meeting, attendees were asked to focus on the topic of social networks and academy:

how do students use social networks and which ones are they using now?

what might students expect of the library and its staff who are on the same social networks (for example, how do they want to interact with an institutional accounts on networks? how do they want to interact with us as library staff with personal/professional accounts on these networks?)

the video “Hangout” feature in Google+ that Roy Tennant from OCLC used while we met that let him hold an informal video conference call with librarians who wanted to talk about the 856 field.

Mobile Databases Page
We got a preview of the mobile databases page that will link users to library databases that are optimized to work on mobile phones. The page itself is just an ordinary LibGuide page that looks kind of odd in a regular browser but renders in a much more mobile friendly way in a phone’s browser. The draft of the page shown was the result of the second round of usability testing; the release version of the page will be subject to one more round of usability testing.

LibX Toolbar
A new Firefox/IE toolbar is being developed that will let users search the catalog, our e-journals lookup tool, or Bearcat regardless of what site the user happens to be on. Another notable feature is that when the user is on a book page in Amazon or other online booksellers, a Bearcat icon will appear on the screen that when clicked will run an ISBN lookup in the catalog to see if we own a copy of that item.

On a related note, I want to say that if there were just one podcast that I could recommend to academic librarians, I would suggest MediaBerkman, which pulls together the interviews done at the center as well as the presentations by scholars.

Looking at both digital memory and analog devices, the researchers calculate that humankind is able to store at least 295 exabytes of information. (Yes, that’s a number with 20 zeroes in it.)

Put another way, if a single star is a bit of information, that’s a galaxy of information for every person in the world. But it’s still less than 1 percent of the information stored in all the DNA molecules of a human being.

2002 could be considered the beginning of the digital age, the first year worldwide digital storage capacity overtook total analog capacity. As of 2007, almost 94 percent of our memory is in digital form.

In 2007, humankind successfully sent 1.9 zettabytes of information through broadcast technology such as televisions and GPS. That’s equivalent to every person in the world reading 174 newspapers every day.

On two-way communications technology, such as cell phones, humankind shared 65 exabytes of information through telecommunications in 2007, the equivalent of every person in the world communicating the contents of six newspapers every day.

In 2007, all the general-purpose computers in the world computed 6.4 x 10^18 instructions per second, in the same general order of magnitude as the number of nerve impulses executed by a single human brain. Doing these instructions by hand would take 2,200 times the period since the Big Bang.

From 1986 to 2007, the period of time examined in the study, worldwide computing capacity grew 58 percent a year, 10 times faster than the United States’ gross domestic product.

Art Project
We took a spin through Art Project, a new service from Google that uses its Street View technology to map out the interiors of art museums around the world (such as the Frick Collection) and that lets you zoom in incredibly close to art in those institutions (see, for example, Rembrandt’s “The Nightwatch” at the Rijksmuseum).

Why are some areas or specific paintings in the museum Street View imagery blurred?

Some of the paintings and features captured with Street View were required to be blurred by the museums for reasons pertaining to copyrights.

Ebooks
We talked briefly about patron-driven acquisition of ebooks and about how services like Portico will allow us to access ebook content that we’ve licensed even if the provider goes out of business. Since Mike Waldman was unable to attend today’s Tech Sharecase, we agreed to hold off until a later meeting any discussion of the criteria that a librarian might use when deciding which format to purchase a specific book: ebook vs. hardcover vs. paper.

A second edition of Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment was also a subject of discussion, as the author, David Bordwell, was selling the PDF directly after the university press that published the first edition let the book go out of print.

SSRN
We poked around in SSRN, a repository of papers in the social sciences, to see how it ranked Baruch among other business schools whose faculty have contributed oft-downloaded papers.

This afternoon, using the Google Search Stories service I spent all of 5 minutes putting together this video on open access. I’m wondering if there might be an interesting and fun classroom activity to do with students that has them using this service.

Students on Twitter
We talked about whether it seems like more Baruch students are on Twitter these days and fewer are on Facebook. If you look at the Twitter search on “baruch college” you’ll see that a number of the tweets are clearly from students. It also appears to be the case that campus use of Skype is larger than expected.

Libraries Acquring Ebooks Rights?
An interesting blog post by Eric Hellman about whether it might make sense for a national consortium of libraries to form that would try to negotiate for rights to select ebooks.

While investigating who was behind this blog (a company that offers training in search engine marketing), I learned that PPC stands for “pay per click” (the phrase is not new to me but the acronym was).

The conversation moved towards other ways of displaying information and the tools used to do so. Microsoft was mentioned given the fact that Excel 2010 is going to incorporate Spark Lines. We then took at look at Google Motion Charts that can be used in iGoogle and Google Docs. A few of us were introduced to motion charts through Hans Rosling’s Wealth & Health of Nations Motion Chart and his TED Talk . Also shown was the Wall Street Journal’smarket sector maps for stock performance.

A couple of other web sites were mentioned: 1) Many Eyes a site for sharing data visualization and 2) InfoChimps for downloading all sorts of data sets.

Also touched upon was the Netflix prize. This was a $1 million contest for accurate predictions of movie ratings based on Netflix user movie preferences. The prize was awarded last September and a new contest was announced.

MiscellaneousThe conversation then moved to the current and future state of student printing, some of the issues and possible solutions. We also discussed the use of GoogleDocs on campus.

Lastly, we talked about the Boston, MA, public media outlet WGBH’s Open Vault–their online media archive and library. Roy Tennant’s covered Open Vault in a recent Library Journal blog entry.